Back in June, that doyen of business reporting, Robert Peston, gave the Charles Wheeler Memorial Lecture at the University of Westminster.
He spent some of his time sticking a couple of well-manicured fingers up at Buzzfeed, the hugely successful content stream business which relies significantly on Listicles (lists of bitesize nuggets) and animated GIFs. He says, "In a commercial world where hits mean money, it is legitimate to fear that difficult journalism will increasingly be squeezed out by massively popular stories..."
Peston may be right - but he's horribly wrong to have Buzzfeed in his sights. For starters Buzzfeed has published some exceptional, well-researched, in-depth longform journalism; most recently on the Palestine situation, for example.
Second, unlike the many